In the last quarter of the eighteenth century two great upheavals shook the Atlantic empires of Great Britain and France. The American (1776-1789) and the Haitian (1791-1804) revolutions threw the imperial Atlantic world into chaos, killing and dislocating tens of thousands, depriving European powers of prized colonial possessions, disrupting established political orders and patterns of commerce, and finally, creating the first two independent post-colonial nation states in the Americas.

This course considers the Age of Revolution in the North Atlantic world, roughly encompassing the latter half of the eighteenth century, as a continuous sequence of radical challenges to established authority resulting in fundamental transformations of governance throughout the region. We will view the progression of the American and Haitian revolutions as a kind of chain reaction, as if the Atlantic world was, as historian R.R. Palmer has written, “swept in the last four decades of the eighteenth century by a single revolutionary movement,” though one of widely ranging inspirations, goals, and outcomes. While our focus will remain on British North America and French St. Domingue, we will discuss the impact of events in Europe on the American colonies as well as the reverberations that these American revolutions had in the Old World. Exploring how various groups of people contended with order and anarchy, slavery and liberty, the course will highlight connections between the various revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements that transformed American territories from imperial colonies to fledgling nation states. As the course examines the relations between economy, social organization, and political struggle on a grand scale, we will consider the ways that the aspirations and actions of common men and women mediated major developments in circum-Atlantic history.

Jack P. Greene, “The Origins of the New Colonial Policy, 1748-1763,” in A Companion Guide, pp. 101-11
Thomas L. Purvis, “The Seven Years’ War and its Political Legacy,” in A Companion Guide, pp. 112-117

Cycles of Rebellion

T 2/24 SLAVE INSURGENCY

Michael Craton, “Jamaica, 1760: Tacky’s Revolt,” in Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 125-39
Carolyn Fick, “Slave Resistance,” The Making of Haiti: The St. Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 46-75

Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, pp. 3-36
Woody Holton, “’Rebel Against Rebel’: Enslaved Virginians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105 (Spring 1997), 157-92

The Constitution of the U.S.A: Revolutionary Idealism and Conservative Realism

T 3/23 FROM REVOLUTION TO CONSTITUTION

Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, pp. 37-59, 100-130

Th 3/25 WINNERS AND LOSERS

Jan Lewis, “’Of Every Age Sex & Condition’: The Representation of Women in the Constitution,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 15 (Fall 1995), pp. 359-87
Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Richard Beeman et al, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 188-225
James H. Merrell, “Declarations of Independence: Indian-White Relations in the New Nation,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., The American Revolution: its Character and its Limits (New York: New York University Press, 1987), pp. 197-223

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, Chapter XIII, pp. 289-377
David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815” in Geggus and David Barry Gaspar, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution in the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 1-50

Th 4/29 THE SLAVEHOLDERS RESPOND

James Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800,” Journal of Southern History 63, No.3 (1997), pp.531-52
Michael Zuckerman, “The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution in St. Domingue,” Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 175-218